Volume 8, Number 9 · May 18, 1967
Research
By Peter Wirth
In response to Blow-Up
(April 20, 1967)
To the Editors:
The phrase "the intense inane," quoted by Elizabeth Hardwick in her review of William Manchester's Death of a President, is not Poe's but Shelley's. It appears in the last line of Act Three of Prometheus Unbound: "Pinacled dim in the intense inane," where its use is by no means sardonic.
Peter Wirth
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts